ะŸะพัั‚ั‹ ั ั‚ัะณะพะผ: subversives

Kill Your Innovation Champion

Published date: April 5, 2010 ะฒ 2:00 am

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Here are five things companies need to do to develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives to encourage successful innovation:
1.  Kill Your Innovation Champion:  It seems like a great idea to establish an โ€œinnovation championโ€ โ€“ responsible and accountable for driving innovation within the organization.  In reality, it stifles innovation.  Assigning a champion lets everyone off the hook.  Why innovate when we have our โ€œchampionโ€ to do it ?   A study by the Association of Innovation Managers found that when companies assign innovation champions and establish separate funding, it threatens the R&D and the commercial departments.  โ€œThis kind of sponsorship opens the door for subtle forms of sabotage if the established business units believe that the innovation funding is inhibiting their ability to accomplish short-term objectives and take care of current customers. Without involvement, the commercial arm of an organization can also claim no responsibility for success or be blamed for failure.โ€  Instead of relying champions, a better approach is to encourage โ€œinnovation
subversives
.โ€
If you wonโ€™t kill your champion, no worry โ€“ they will go away on their own.  The study also looked at what puts innovation managers at risk.  Of the 15 innovation champions in the study, 10 left their organizations and became consultants, 4 joined smaller or start-up companies, and 1 retired.  None returned to a Fortune 500 company.
2.  Donโ€™t Give Credit for Good Ideas:   Tanya Menon from the University of Chicago describes the paradox of an external idea being viewed as โ€œtemptingโ€ while the exact same idea, coming from an internal source, is considered โ€œtainted.โ€

โ€œIn a business era that celebrates anything creative, novel, or that demonstrates leadership, โ€œborrowingโ€ or โ€œcopyingโ€ knowledge from internal colleagues is often not a career-enhancing strategy. Employees may rightly fear that acknowledging the superiority of an internal rivalโ€™s ideas would display deference and undermine their own status.
By contrast, the act of incorporating ideas from outside firms is not seen as merely copying, but rather as vigilance, benchmarking, and stealing the thunder of a competitor. An external threat inflames fears about group survival, but does not elicit direct and personal threats to oneโ€™s competence or organizational status. As a result, learning from an outside competitor can be much less psychologically painful than learning from a colleague who is a direct rival for promotions and other rewards.โ€

3.  Fire the Lone Innovator:  Innovation is a team sport.  Keith Sawyer in his book, Group Genius highlights one of the most significant aspects of successful innovation โ€“ that groups of people are likely to be more creative than individuals working on their own.  A properly facilitated approach with a carefully selected โ€œdream teamโ€ of employees yields innovation sooner, better, and bolder than the lone genius.
4.  Teach Innovation:  Innovation is a skill, not a gift.  It can be taught using structured innovation processes and templates.  Many universities offer courses and programs to learn innovation.  It is unacceptable that a corporation seeking growth through innovation would not have its employees properly trained in the skill of innovating.
5.  Build Innovation Muscle:  The best companies see innovation as an ongoing capability, not a one time event.  These companies work hard to build muscle around this capability so they can deploy it when they need it, where they need it, tackling their hardest problems.  Companies do this to keep up with the ever changing landscape both inside and outside the firm.  What does it mean to build innovation muscle?  I think of it as the number of people trained, the frequency of using an innovation method, and the percentage of internal departments that have an innovation capability.  Call it an Innovation Muscle Index:  N (number of trained employees) x F (number of formal ideation events per year using a method) x P (percent of company departments with at least one employee trained in an effective innovation method).   Innovation Muscle Index = N x F x P .

Innovation Dream Team

Published date: March 1, 2009 ะฒ 7:26 pm

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Innovating takes teamwork.  Properly selected teams using a facilitated systematic method will outperform ad hoc teams using divergent, less structured methods such as brainstorming.  How do you create the โ€œdream teamโ€ for an innovation project?  There are three key factors: team roles, diversity, and processes.

Roles

A carefully selected team for innovation will have specific roles that can make or break it, not just during the innovation sessions, but afterward too.  The most essential role, not surprising, is the leader.  The team โ€œcaptainโ€ is the one who gives momentum and direction to a team in terms of where it will innovate.  Here is the catch.  The team leader must be a full participant in the innovation workshops.  The leader cannot be an occasional, part time member who surfs in and out while attending other business.  That shows a lack of commitment.  The leader misses opportunities to reward team members and misses the sense of team direction and excitement around new ideas.  The leader also plays an essential role of being the โ€œbrakesโ€of the group โ€“ stopping ideas that he or she knows do not fit the vision of the franchise or company.  This prevents teams from wasting time on weak ideas so they can channel their ideation in more productive areas.

Innovation Competency

Published date: March 4, 2008 ะฒ 12:12 pm

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Tug_2Jeffrey Phillips outlines a sound approach to the age-old question, who owns innovation?  Where does it sit on the organizational chart:

Thereโ€™s not a wrong way to organize, but there are benefits to developing a central team to ensure consistent methodology, language and culture and the use of consistent tools and frameworks. Eventually, most ideas if adopted will be implemented in a specific business unit or product team, so the central team acts as a facilitator, coach and sponsor, usually without implementing the ideas.

There is support for this view.  IBM asked 765 CEOโ€™s this question in their 2006 Global CEO Survey, and reported the following on the question of who has responsibility for innovation leadership:  the CEO โ€“ 27%, No Owner โ€“ 27%, Functional Managers โ€“ 24%, and Division Managers โ€“ 14%.

The wide range of responses tells me there is no consensus.  But the question still makes me a little nervous.  Why does someone have to โ€œownโ€ innovation?  Do we think about leadership the same way?  Does someone own leadership in a company?  No one asks that question.

I get hopeful when I see that 27% of CEOโ€™s ascribe no owner to innovation.  My sense is that creating an innovation champion or assigning it to one department could shut down others from innovating.  With strong, central ownership of innovation, others might be reluctant to initiate anything that looks like a competing approach.  When I see a company with an innovation champion (think โ€œownerโ€), I expect to find innovation subversives, too.

The question is not who owns innovation, but rather who owns innovation competency development.  I see more companies moving in this direction.  Some place this within a process excellence group while others move it right into a functional department such as marketing or R&D.  Still others have dedicated resources such as GE and Diageo, two members of the MSI Innovation Roundtable.

Build innovation competency and the question of who owns innovation becomes moot.

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